Third Wheel
by nathan-p
Summary: It kind of sucks to be left out. Reilly angstfic, Jeb/ter Borcht implied.


This is _not_ a healthy way to cope.

But it's better than nothing.

He doesn't feel anything in particular, except a vague sense that he _should_ be feeling something.

Maybe that's a bad sign.

He should feel torn and broken, despairing and depressed.

He doesn't feel a thing.

Normally he's aware of his heartbeat -- at least, if he thinks about it for a while, he can feel it, gently pulsing away.

But now... even when he presses his fingers to his neck he can't seem to find his pulse, until he drops his hand leadenly and gives up. (Or should that be the other way around?)

There's a hollow space where his heart should be, a feeling of irrational lightness that only makes sense when he thinks about it: he gave his heart away, and the person he gave it to (_Jeb_) didn't give a (_his_) heart back in return.

It's not lightness, he thinks -- it's just an absence.

Which makes sense, if he gave his heart away.

He doesn't have the energy to get up and turn the light off, so instead he closes his eyes, and the light makes his eyelids feel transparent.

_He_ feels transparent -- invisible even to grief, his molecules arranged in such a way that even light can't see him. It just passes on through.

In a way he likes this better.

He should feel abandoned, angry, let-down, rejected -- anything but nothing at all.

Something.

He should feel _something. _

He opens his eyes and looks up at the ceiling. He feels, vaguely, like he should get up and turn off the light, but he's too heavy to move from where he is, too weighed down by feeling what he shouldn't.

Apathy, it turns out, is denser than lead.

This isn't a coping strategy, he thinks remotely. It's deferring the pain until later. At some point it's going to come crashing down on him, heavier than even this, tugging him downwards into the dark with the inertia that he's lost.

He kind of wants that to happen. (Now would be great.)

Would they even notice if he disappeared like that?

No, he thinks spitefully. Jeb's too concerned with fucking _Roland_ to care about some good-for-nothing lab tech like Reilly. And ter Borcht's too wrapped up in helping _Jeb_ be normal (or something somewhat like it) to notice if Reilly takes this fall.

None of them care about him.

Not even his best fucking _friend_ -- and he wouldn't inflict this on Kyle, anyway. Kyle's got a good life. He doesn't need Reilly's pain too.

Kyle doesn't need to hear about this.

And that's _further_ not a healthy coping strategy.

With a stunningly ill-timed burst of dull realization, Reilly has an epiphany: his Psychology teacher wasn't lying when he said how PBD was the cruelest mental disorder. Other disorders can hit you slow enough you don't know something's wrong.

PBD only hits people who can tell that they're defective. That something in their brains has gone wrong. That they're going insane.

In between their bouts of sickness, mad scientists know they're mad.

Reilly knows that this is dangerous -- turns out he can't even be fucking _depressed_ right. He knows that these patterns of thought aren't good ones.

And yet he can't escape them. He can't convince himself he's worth something, can't even persuade himself to _feel_ something.

He closes his eyes again, unwilling to stare at the ceiling any longer while he looks for patterns that still aren't there, that won't appear no matter how long he spends trying to find them. His eyes are getting tired.

He wishes he could sleep. _That_ feeling nothing would be better than _this_ feeling nothing -- at least while you're asleep you can dream.

Even if he didn't dream, he wouldn't be dogged by thoughts of Jeb, wouldn't be thinking of things he could have done differently, wouldn't be thinking that in the end, it was doomed to fail anyway.

Because he would have been part of it.

But this is too many layers of possibility for his fragile sanity to hold, and Reilly pushes these thoughts aside.

It's hard for him to breathe, and he focuses on each breath he draws as he draws it, in an effort to distract himself from these spirals of repetitive thought.

But it doesn't work. It never works, and no matter how he tries he's drawn irrevocably back to the same thoughts he was having before: a confusing mix of anger at Jeb (for having what Reilly can't -- someone who _cares_), despair (because again he's proved his worthlessness to himself), and God, he's too tired to try and distill them into words, but: a mix of emotions that thread upward like vines through the lattices of his thoughts, growing over them like ivy on an old house, rioting over the brick until it crumbles away into iron-red dust.

He's exhausted. Thinking of an image that intricate and strong makes him more tired than he was -- even if it wasn't thinking so much as it was extracting it from his subconscious, inch by careful inch.

In a way -- an irrational, perfect way -- he almost _hates_ Jeb, for having what Reilly will never have, can't have, doesn't _deserve_: someone who would listen if he called for help.

Someone who _did_ listen, he remembers bitterly.

He doesn't even exactly want someone like that -- it's too much to aspire to, for someone like him.

But if someone were to _ask_ him -- if someone asked him if he was all right -- there's the remotest, thinnest possibility he would say _no_, that he would spill his guts and tell the whole story for once.

If someone were there to ask.

Reilly can't breathe because he's fighting back tears, losing a final battle against emotions he couldn't suppress. Can't suppress. Has given up on suppressing, because what's the point in trying anymore?

No matter how hard he tries, eventually he gives in and allows himself to sob, and after that there's no stopping it: Reilly is crying again.


End file.
